Backseat Saints by Joshilyn Jackson Read Free Book Online

sleight of hand, she deposited it in Esther Jenkins’s purse. Esther was
     head dog in the small pack of homeschooled Pentecostal Holiness girls that marched through Fruiton’s tiny mall in formation,
     wearing a uniform of white Keds and long denim jumpers. The ends of their hair were ratty and fine. It was their baby hair,
     never once cut. Theywere a wedge of ignorance and virtue that pushed through the Fruiton Baptist kids in a viceless unit, except that every single
     one of them was addicted to orange-flavored baby aspirin. The weight of so much uncut hair gave them all near constant headaches.
    Esther had a pretty face with a pointy mouse nose, and the next two times Rose saw her around town, the nose was pointed down
     at that book. Her gaggle of dowdy friends were crowded around her, all of them listening as she whisper-read the dirty parts
     to them. They probably had no more than an inkling about what might go where before that book, but lucky for them, Dana had
     dog-eared the sex parts.
    Rose also spent a solid week hooking the wallets of every boy on the football team and removing the hopeful condom. In one
     fell swoop, she transferred the entire handful to Myla Richard’s lunch box. She’d gotten ribbed and plain, latex and lambskin,
     even one exceptionally optimistic Trojan Magnum XL lifted off a jock whose ex-girlfriend had once said, in an unrelated conversation,
     that he emphatically did not need the accommodation. “I can tuck the whole thing in my cheek, like a Tootsie Pop drop,” she’d
     told Rose, her tone fond. “I call it Little Turtle Head, but not out loud anymore. He gets mad.”
    Myla found a condom assortment in her lunch that was as plentiful and varied as the boys she took up to the old tree fort
     behind her house. She made a fuss when she found them, though, demanding to know who had put them in her food. Then she made
     a big show of dumping them out in the trash with her sandwich rind and empty fruit cup. She should have shut her pie hole
     and used them; by the end of the year, she’d dropped out to have a baby.
    Ro Grandee had no reason in her life for Rose Mae’s brand of object-shifting thievery. I’d lost the habit of moving with sleepy
     slowness, but as I walked toward the waiting gypsy, it came back to me. As I got close, I had time to see all the ways that
     we were different. Her long hair had salt white stripes running through it, and it was chocolate brown, not dark as mink.
     She had my small-framed,curvy kind of figure, but even with the layers I could see she was bigger on top. Her skin was olive where mine was paper
     white. Still, she had a tippy-tilt nose and my same kind of bowed, fat-lipped mouth. We were so alike, and even before she
     spoke, I believe I must have known her.
    As I reached her, she gestured toward a table near the coffee stand. Her hands were bare of rings. No bracelets, and no watch,
     either, as if all her extra clothes had made jewelry unnecessary. I could see beads at her throat, though, peeping through
     the scarves. A rosary.
    I nodded and she flowed past me, moving easier in her body than I ever had, and I found myself turning as smoothly as if I
     were on a lazy Susan, carried by her momentum. I followed her five steps to the table, still so slow that she was seated and
     settled two breaths before I eased myself down in the chair across from her.
    “If you want coffee, you have to get it at the counter,” she said. Her voice was throaty and low, like she was hoarse or a
     heavy smoker, but she didn’t smell like ashtrays. She smelled tangy, like ginger and orange peel.
    “I don’t want coffee,” I said.
    Her lips pressed together, exasperated. “I’m not sure we can sit here if we don’t get coffee.”
    I shrugged, my shoulders coming up slow, slow, and then I eased them down an inch at a time instead of dropping them.
    “What are those cards?” I asked.
    “A tarot deck,” she answered. I had never seen tarot cards,